Big questions and big numbers: We cannot live without big and ambitious economic models. But neither can we entirely trust them. Jul 13th 2006. The Economist. Link

February 2, 2012 9:50 pm
Entering the sense-making era of big social data
By Eric Openshaw and J.R. Reagan Link

March 2, 2012 9:50 pm
School for quants
By Sam Knight. Financial Times.Link

The Global Reach of American Social Science. The Chronicle Review. Lisa Anderson. Sept. 26, 2003. Link

An insider view on the relevance of political scientists to government. Link

Impact of Social Sciences: Maximizing the impact of academic
research (A London School of Economics Blog) Link

Attack on science, or a wakeup call? FY 2013 NSF Political Science Research Funding Eliminated by House. Link

The Campaign to re-brand the social scientist - The public re-construction of a diverse discipline . (Academy of Social Sciences, UK) LinkUniversities Reshaping Education on the Web. Tamar Lewin. July 17, 2012. New York Times.Online courses have been around for years, but now big-name colleges and competing software platforms have entered the field, which is evolving with astonishing speed.Link

How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventureby Chip Morningstar
June 1993 Link

Student debt
(This ties into the interests of this blog from two different sides – problems with academia on the one hand, and the myopia of the cause of the current financial crisis (debt) in economics on the other

Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail - and Why We Believe Them Anyway. 2010. Dan Gardner. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Link"In 2008, as the price of oil surged above $140 a barrel, experts said it would soon hit $200; a few months later it plunged to $30. In 1967, they said the USSR would have one of the fastest-growing economies in the year 2000; in 2000, the USSR did not exist. In 1911, it was pronounced that there would be no more wars in Europe; we all know how that turned out. Face it, experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Philip E. Tetlock. Princeton Univeristy Press. 2005. Amazon “Look inside” and reviews

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? Cato Policy Report, January/February 1998by Robert NozickRobert Nozick is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and the author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia and other books. This article is excerpted from his essay "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" which originally appeared in The Future of Private Enterprise, ed. Craig Aronoff et al. (Georgia State University Business Press, 1986) and is reprinted in Robert Nozick, Socratic Puzzles (Harvard University Press, 1997).

Our explanation of the disproportionate anti-capitalism of intellectuals is based upon a very plausible sociological generalization.

In a society where one extra-familial system or institution, the first young people enter, distributes rewards, those who do the very best therein will tend to internalize the norms of this institution and expect the wider society to operate in accordance with these norms; they will feel entitled to distributive shares in accordance with these norms or (at least) to a relative position equal to the one these norms would yield. Moreover, those constituting the upper class within the hierarchy of this first extra-familial institution who then experience (or foresee experiencing) movement to a lower relative position in the wider society will, because of their feeling of frustrated entitlement, tend to oppose the wider social system and feel animus toward its norms.

The University in RuinsBill Readings Harvard University Press (October 30, 1997)University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher EducationJennifer Washburn Basic 2005Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis
for Social Policy. New York: Basic, 1995.

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“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”